


You, Your Ghost, and the Ghost of You

by justira



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5 Things, 5 kisses, 5 senses, Artist Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes After Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Identity Issues, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-12
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-06-26 02:16:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15653706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justira/pseuds/justira
Summary: You are a person in love with the impossible. Or maybe your ghost is.





	You, Your Ghost, and the Ghost of You

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [seventymilestobabylon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/seventymilestobabylon) for enormous help as this thing developed; she was a fantastic beta and truly made the story a better version of itself. Thanks also to [Midnight_Run](https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnight_run), whose steadfast cheerleading, interest, and beta input helped so much in getting me to finish this thing and kick it out the door.

When you first feel the wet creep of _want_ in your veins, there is no warmth to it. For a long time, you can't even identify this intruder in your body. It feels like poison, hollow and thick. It drags at your limbs. It dries your tongue and leaves it clinging in your mouth. You think it must be hunger, and mechanically stuff your body with nutrients; it lessens for a time, sulking away only to return in a petulant, greedy tide. You think then that it may be withdrawal, predictable neurochemical contortions gone on too long. You've done withdrawal. You've done time. You've done the absence of time. Time cures withdrawal, or your handlers do. They tried temporary enhancements, they tried stimulants, they tried suppressants. The chemicals fade, and the missions remain.

Time does not fix the want.

It isn't hunger, or not only hunger. It's not withdrawal, though the keen edge of it seems familiar.

It clings to you, like the ghost that haunts you. This heightens your suspicions for a time, but the ghost is constant while the want isn't. The ghost isn't HYDRA: if anything, you haunt _them_ now. It's not Bucky. A ghost exists, at least. You can't vouch for Bucky on that one.

When you finally understand the want, you're in a crowded plaza in Vienna in a mild May heat, and the realization brings a backwash of something else you haven't felt in a long time: shame. This, at least, you recognize.

You _want_ ice cream. Milky sweetness, cold, maybe something more that clings to the memory of it.

If the Winter Soldier laughed, you would laugh. You are not sure you are him. A man called Bucky laughed, once. You're not sure you're him, either.

The ghost says you are.

The ghost is the man on the bridge, the man who calls himself your friend and then shoves into your hands, into your mouth, into your head, a history like it's the script for a play. You don't know your lines. The ghost whispers them in your ear, shouts them across rooftops, carves them into your bones, but they are his words, not yours.

So you run. And you want ice cream.

You haven't been allowed appetites in the length of your memory, what there is of it. Hunger, absence, deprivation: these are routine. Appetite is so far beyond your remembrance that you can't even call it a luxury. It's simply foreign, venomous in its quiet insistence. The want is dragging something along behind it, it's such a specific appetite, you _want_ something, something that will feel good in your mouth and calm in your belly and you can't recall the taste but you know its fevered ghost. You bounce back and forth between ignoring it and scratching madly at it, and in your harried scrabbling you knock loose bricks from the rat maze in your mind and catch glimpses of a man or a boy that is you and unlike you, and he wants this too, and you realize that you have wanted ice cream much more often than you have ever had it. The boy that was you shared it with the boy that became a symbol and became a mission and became your ghost.

The ghost and the want are not the same thing, but they become tangled together in this maze that is your head.

You eat the damn ice cream, because you are fucking tired.

 

___________________________

 

 

Bucky's been saving up for this. It's been hotter than hell this week, so the ice cream men are out, and when Bucky said, "Damn, haven't had any in ages," and Steve said, "I guess. Sounds nice," and Bucky came at him with sheer disbelief because who hasn't had ice cream and come on don't you want to try it? Steve looked at him in that weird way like he was adding up numbers in his head and Bucky was the numbers and Steve wasn't sure about the sum. Sometimes Bucky just wants to smear that look off his face, because what's there to figure? It's Bucky, and now it's Bucky and Steve, and that's how it is. But in the end Steve smiled and said "It sounds great," and went back to his doodling. Ha. Bucky's no idiot.

Well, turns out Steve is. Bucky knew that, but it's when he's got the cash together and is scrambling around peeking in alleyways because he wants Steve to pick the flavor for his very first time that Bucky realizes that Steve is much, much dumber than Bucky thought because there he is, staring at Bucky from across the street, a big cone of chocolate ice cream dribbling untouched down his hand.

If Steve's going to secretly buy Bucky ice cream he could at least have one lousy bite himself instead of just letting it melt.

"I sold sketches," Steve says as soon as Bucky's reached him. He says it stubborn, like Bucky's gonna get on his case about the money. Steve has no idea how this works, does he? He's always acting like there's a thing between them Steve has to climb over, and it's not true. Steve just likes going against the odds, and it's stupid to think Bucky isn't a sure bet.

"Are you soft in the head?" Bucky says. "Come on, try it before you gotta lick it off the street!"

"I got it for you," and Steve's thrusting the drippy mess at him with his jaw set.

"Yeah, and I was gonna get _you_ some." Bucky rolls his eyes, and shows Steve the coins from his pocket.

Steve eyes the money like it might bite him, or like Bucky might, and suddenly Bucky has no idea what's going on, thinking that thought. There's a shot of static, electricity down his throat, a taste like nothing he knows. But then Steve's digging around in his own pocket with the hand that's not covered in ice cream and it comes back out jingling.

"I sold a _lot_ of sketches," Steve says, and it's almost like Steve can't quite get enough air when he says it. "I was just bringing you yours first."

That grin is lopsided and messy like Steve's not sure how to put one together properly, and Bucky blinks and then just laughs, and grabs Steve by the face and lays him a good one right on the mouth and messes his hair and tells him he's the stupidest genius on the planet. "Now try it, come on, and I'll finish it and we'll buy each other seconds, huh?"

Steve tries it, and loves it, and buys Bucky more chocolate and picks strawberry for himself, and gets horribly sick from it all and Bucky feels pretty terrible about it, but Steve says it was all worth it just to try, and the tired smile between fits of sick makes Bucky think yeah, it sorta was.

 

___________________________

 

 

Eating the ice cream was a bad idea.

The chemical creep went away. But you pick out the shame in the memory, like picking out stitches. It's because it didn't mean the same thing to Bucky as it meant to Steve. There's something sour that gathers in your throat, Bucky meaning a thing Steve didn't. Bucky not giving Steve a choice about being part of that story. The ghost is telling you a story. The ghost is pushing a meaning on you, a story of yourself and your self. You don't know what the ghost thinks, what the ghost wants. Or maybe you do.

You distract yourself with the other wrongnesses in the ice cream you just had. It tasted wrong, and you learn about pasteurization laws. So many things are wrong, in your head, in the world. Tomatoes seemed harmless but now, out here, you are aware of the difference like it's a hot iron pressing into your skin, a fractured syzygy of impressions: Bucky tasting tomatoes and you tasting tomatoes and the Winter Soldier being fed things that must have had tomatoes in them, and they're all the same and nothing like each other. You can't help noticing these things, now. If you stay too close to where the ghost came from then things taste different in a way you hate. Get far enough away, and _everything_ tastes different and it's like white noise, matching the noise inside your skull. You could disappear, like this. Feeling everything so much that it's like feeling nothing. You do disappear, disappear so thoroughly the ghost could never find you. You are nothing. You are white on white on white.

And then something will hit like a car wreck, and you're a wreck, and you don't even know why: something tastes both familiar and different, and that's all it takes. The differences in flavour are like bulldozers charging through the walls in your mind, the walls others built but then you kept up, because it was easier. You think sometimes about the texture of crushed brick in your hands. You know you made that. You punched through a wall with the arm they made you have, and you remember feeling the brick dust in your other hand. Bucky's hand? No. A hand that sends signals to your brain.

You have to get away from this. You have to find things that don't feel this way.

There is a bird pecking at the snow. Its feet leave delicate imprints as it moves in short hops, the flick of its wings ghosting along the powder. The cold touches you somewhere vital. An animal is waking inside you, the rush of adrenaline dripping in its teeth and, silent on a park bench, you seethe with the panic that bubbles under your skin. It is cold and you don't know why: when you saw him last it was warm. You don't know how long ago that was. A season? Have you lost a season?

You breathe past the clog of chemicals in your throat, and listen. People move around you, speaking a language that you don't. You pick through the cadences until you piece enough together to know: you did not lose a season. You are in the southern hemisphere. Somewhere on the other side of the world, it is warm. But that is where he is searching for you. And so, you are here.

 

___________________________

 

 

The Commandos inhale tasteless meals, drink stale coffee that should have been poured out two camps back. Bucky is playing with a fir twig, the bark ridged against his ungloved left hand, sticky with sap. He cracks it, crushes the needles between his fingers, but the cold air seeps away even that sharp scent. Snow's falling around them, muffling sight and sound, though Bucky's ears still haven't recovered from the last sortie. There are snatches of warmth: the fire, the low roll of the Commandos' chatter, Dernier's sharp laugh. Steve, settling beside him. The cold wind licks away sensation, but texture still stands out with a clarity that jars him. Everything is coarse, rough, scratchy: coats, blankets, bandages, branches, rocks. That's fine, he thinks: he remembers HYDRA labs, HYDRA weapons, HYDRA words, slick and smooth, and his fingertips itch. He snaps the twig into quarters this time, feeling the bark break apart, the sinewy strength of the wood underneath, tearing under the pressure. Then Steve's hand settles over his.

"You with me?" Steve’s eyes are serious, snow caught in his eyelashes against the blue.

He is. He's right here. Steve's hand is solid over his, grip light.

Bucky shapes the words in his mouth, feels his tongue on his own teeth. "This look like our last stop to you?"

The smile is in Steve's eyes, but Bucky knows where to look for it. Sometimes Bucky doesn't know how he got here, to this impossible place, and he thinks it must be because of Steve. Steve always tried to do the impossible, and now it's far past trying. Steve does things no man should dream of, and Bucky watches him do it through a rifle sight. An uncrossable gulf. And then when Bucky trembles in these seething silent spaces within himself, Steve will sit beside him and put a hand on his, unfamiliar callus on unfamiliar hands that curve a warmth around Bucky's fingers that is familiar beyond words. Bucky swallows, looking at him.

Steve stands up, orders the Commandos to bed down, and Bucky follows him to their tent.

The snow falls on Bucky with its faint static hiss, pale and ghostly, hesitant kisses on his hands. Or maybe that is not the snow, the feeling confusing for a moment, texture folding into something stranger. Hesitant kisses? No. Steve wouldn't hesitate. And then Steve’s pulled Bucky inside and there is no more snow. It's texture that hits hardest, sharp enough to cut. Steve's mouth, soft and warm and wet. Steve's hair between his fingertips. Strength like steel under skin. Bucky loses himself there, surrounded by Steve, somewhere in a cold German night.

 

___________________________

 

 

You clench and unclench your hands. They are the same size, impeccably so. The snow falls on them, and you flatten your palms for it, spread your fingers for it. Not begging, hands cupped. The snow melts on your right hand and accumulates on your left. They feel different, the soft crystalline brush on the one and the more concrete signals from the other: cold, damp, barely any pressure.

The Winter Soldier doesn't like winter, you think.

You find yourself looking at an azure stretch of coast. It's crystal clear, and it's nowhere the ghost knows to find you. It is impossibly beautiful. You wonder how you know that. How you know about impossible things. You've been asked to do the impossible many times, but now the ghost is asking you to _be_ the impossible, and it's an itch upon your skin, this self the ghost is pressing against you, hands closed over your mouth, your nose, your throat.

You breathe in this clear air, your lungs filling.

You put your hands in the water, both of them, and it feels almost the same. One hand feels: the soft press of submersion, the small currents of the coastline, the cool contrast with the sun that beats on you above. The other hand feels: temperature difference, pressure signals from several directions, something wired to tell your brain things like _danger_ and _requires maintenance_.

You require maintenance.

You take your hands out of the water and step away. The silicate pressure of the sand hits your feet exactly the same way, right and left, and it is white, white, white all around. There is no one here, because you wanted it that way. The sky is cerulean, bright and dangerous, making you feel seen. Observed. But not known. The sea is cerulean, bright and dangerous, making you feel... you are not sure. There is something about the colour of it, the contrasting feel of the sea and the sky, that makes you sit in the sand for a moment, and look.

 

___________________________

 

 

The sky is bruised, cloudy bandages stretched across it in the high, distant winds; behind them a few feeble stars prick the twilight, constellations starting to shoulder their way through the fading city lights. But Steve's still staring the other way at where the sun's dying in a bloody glory, so Bucky turns back and looks too.

"This—" Steve's skinny arm stretches up, hand splayed, and then the line of his arm softens, fingers folding in to leave the thumb still out. This, Bucky will remember very clearly, the way his bony wrist tips, narrow fingers tucked, the edge of his thumb like a caress across the sky. It's nothing like the measuring-stick straightness Bucky's seen him do to gauge size or distance. It's gentler. _Abstract._ He remembers Steve trying to explain that idea. Then Steve smudges the pad of his thumb across the sky, tracing a line of dirty gold, an orange, a delicate pink. "Can't afford colours like this."

Bucky snorts. The war on, and Steve finds time to think about making his drawings match that unattainable sky. Bucky loves him a little bit more, just for that. "That what you worry about these days? Colours like this?"

A smile tugs at the corner of Steve's mouth, but as he squints at the sunset it looks closer to a grimace. "Not really, no." Then Steve turns to face him. "Sometimes," he amends, smile growing softer.

A static-filled blink of interference, like a haul of stars stormed up from their slow rise to swallow the two of them whole, an ambush in the dark. After that is only an impression of Steve's hand, knuckles tucked to Bucky's jaw, thumb across the warm red that spills down his cheeks. _Colours like this_ , Bucky thinks, and it is red and red and red.

 

___________________________

 

 

You're not sure why you go in the water.

No, not that time. You're not sure about that time either, but this time it's different.

It's not the Caribbean, where you learn you last were. You sat there for a minute or an hour or a day and it looked like it was not for you. It was not for any of you, whoever you are. You felt like a messy pile of sketches strewn in the sand, illegible copies of copies of copies. Steve knew a trick, flipping a book of drawings to make them dance. The ghost is trying to make you dance. Shuffle your feet. Sing a tune. It's not any song you know. But it's like a drumbeat, percussive prods at your brain, and you think: marching drums, telling you to move; a knock on the door, telling you to run; your heartbeat, telling you to live. Sometimes you wish it would stop that last one. More often you wish they all would stop, and you blot out the ghost's song with anything else you can find. Anything that none of you know.

And there is so much of that. You could drown in it.

Sounds you never knew were possible: the smooth keen of electricity through filters, sliding liquid over your skin; the aching scrape of industrial equipment made into music, rough and not quite strange enough; the shattering squeal of it all going wrong, feedback snapping you out and then in and in and down and down. You go wrong. You are wrong. And then maybe it doesn't seem so bad, the bass line offered to keep you stable: do this, do this, do that. Be this. Be that. The ghost catches glimpses of you, and shouts Bucky's name: _Be this for me_.

No.

You try on a new self with every new sound. This gait for that rhythm, this fake smile for that low note, this accent for that soft susurrus that could be a song or just the instruments sighing to a stop. Selves to hide yourself and your self from the ghost, though something tells you the ghost will not be fooled. But maybe _you_ can be. You seek out buskers and watch their hands, study their faces as they make music. Some sing. You prefer the ones that don't: you have enough voices in your head. But their hands hold the shapes of their instruments, the stories they are telling themselves. Telling you. These stories are not about you, and that is why you listen. They are humans who want to be observed, and you observe them. The sounds soak into your skin, and wash away... selves, stink, suffering. Sin. Your very many sins. The tidal heave of it all, receding and returning, there and then not-there. Like you. You are there and then not-there.

You decide to be not there.

There are no humans where you are now. You're back to that again. A tide, going in and out.

There is a river. It's not one you know. The trees around it tug at nothing in your memory, unfamiliar green shapes, unfamiliar bird cries, unfamiliar rustle of unfamiliar grasses. The river's current runs steady against your fingers when you test it, and you follow it, crouching to dip a hand in every mile or so, until you see how it empties into a lake further downstream. You drop your pack, and you step into the water.

When it is up to your neck you can feel how it presses, gentle and insistent, against your whole body. And you let go. You let the water take you, and let the sounds of the world get swallowed and warped and slide past you, unrecognizable and hollow and vague.

It is nothing like the last time, when the water roiled around you, when you made the decision that resurrected the ghost. You could have left him.

You could.

There, in the water.

Here, in the water.

It's quiet.

Your arm is telling you: you require maintenance.

Your arm is dragging you down, deeper into the silence.

All you need to do is move, and take a breath.

 

___________________________

 

 

Bucky didn't know breathing could be so loud. They're panting in each other's faces — Steve's breath with that hint of wheeze to it that cold brings out — and Bucky can barely track what's happening over the noise of it, their breaths and his own heartbeat, their foreheads pressed together, Bucky's head tipped down to Steve's, because— Bucky kissed him. He thinks that's what happened. Did it happen?

_What happened?_ The question thrums in Bucky's blood, a fever beating red and loud in his ears as he pants into the icy night, into Steve's warm face.

Bucky wanted to teach Steve to dance, because Steve was saying he didn't know how when Bucky talked about dancing with girls. They were messing around on the ice in Prospect Park; Steve had gotten paid and Bucky'd badgered him into having probably exactly an ounce to drink, and they were sliding around, the scrape of their shoes on the ice, the black silence all around, just him and Steve, eighteen and alive. Bucky wanted to dance. Wanted to teach Steve to dance, the two of them. Steve is always so serious and Bucky loves seeing him smile, that rare smile that you have to work for. So they laughed and staggered on the ice, and Bucky tried being the girl, to teach Steve to lead, and Bucky'd laughed, and that had been a mistake, Steve's laugh hiccoughing a hesitation, a sound Bucky couldn't stand because what if Steve thought Bucky was laughing at him, and Bucky needed to show that wasn't why and then—

A buzz, a noise so big it swallows suns, Bucky doesn't know what happened, only that suddenly everything was so loud in his head, shouting yes and no and do and don't and he didn't know what to listen to on the inside so he listened to the outside: the shuffle of their feet and the sound of Steve laughing and the way Steve sucked his breath in, just a little, before their mouths met—

A crack like a gunshot, like the end of the world, like the sick scrape of Bucky wrenching himself away from this thing that can't un-happen.

When the ice breaks, Steve is already grabbing at Bucky and, impossibly, stupidly, amazingly, trying to haul him towards the shore.

He can't.

The water swallows sound so abruptly it's like a slap, sudden and absolute and frozen. Bucky's breath punches out of him. The bubbles disturb the black silence — Bucky didn't know black silence before this — and it brings Bucky back to himself, and then there is silt under his feet and he knows he has to move, has to grab Steve, has to drag them the three pathetic feet to where Bucky can stand, even if Steve can't.

When Bucky has Steve on the shore and is thumping his back trying to get the water out and it’s not working he rolls that absurdly skinny body over and breathes into his mouth, slaps his face, breathes again, mouth on mouth, sick and nothing like— anything. Bucky's heartbeat thunders in his ears, and all he can do is breathe, breathe, breathe.

Then Steve coughs— hearing it is a jagged shot of adrenaline down Bucky’s spine, and he laughs out of hysterical relief, the sound winging into the night like panicked pigeons.

Steve spits water, and blinks, squeezes his eyes open and shut. "Aren’t you always telling me I’m the one with the bad ideas?" Steve asks around coughs and wheezes and shivers.

Bucky swallows a question, something about which bad idea does he mean, and stumbles to his feet. His shoes are drenched — there's some dollars down the drain — and he kicks them off, bends down to pick them up with one hand and offer Steve a boost with the other.

Steve blinks up at him, eyes a dusky ice blue in the dark. The water droplets in his eyelashes shiver, silvering as they frost.

He takes Bucky’s hand, and even soaking wet it’s barely anything to haul him up. Bucky figures it wrong and they end up too close together. It never mattered, and now it does. This breath-held moment that used to slide by, a brush on Bucky's skin instead of this sudden clamorous fever in the frozen air. And Bucky freezes, then chafes Steve's shoulders one-handed and says something about getting Steve inside, anywhere where it's warm.

The buzz stays in his skull, echoing and echoing and echoing as he watches Steve shiver.

 

___________________________

 

 

You kick to the surface, and breathe.

The air is warm, and not so different from being underwater: a slow pulse of living things that expect nothing from you. The river has taken you to the lake you saw before, and the water here is calm. Eventually, if you could drift for long enough, the gentle push of the water would bring you to the other edge of the lake, where the river will take you somewhere else.

If only you could decline to participate in the process.

You can't drift. If you hold still, you will be dragged down by the weight of everything that's been done to you. You will drown.

You choose to participate.

You choose to get your pack, dry off, leave. Use the languages they made you know, and ones they didn't. You think: you can do this. You think: you can survive this. You think— you don't know what you think.

There are people again, and you try to find work for your hands to do, gloved and bare. It works and it doesn't; people smile or they scream, and the din echoes in your head but the voices are unfamiliar and that makes it, if not fine, then survivable. You can survive this. You can survive. This is what you choose.

There is a thing that can happen. A noise that is too big to know, and you freeze. You know about freezing. You know about being frozen. You know about the clamour that awakens in your head when you are startled, the dripping drag of adrenaline, and this echoes back and back and down and down. And in. Where you don't always want to go. If there was a time before this, you do not know it, or you tell yourself you don't. But you can hear a thing, and be thrown back like ripping through drywall, insubstantial barrier after insubstantial barrier, and you don't know how far back it goes. Every memory seems to end in ice, in stasis, in static, in not feeling anything. You feel so much it goes back to feeling nothing.

You don't want that.

What do you want? You feel the pressure of that question every moment.

You pick places to live. One after another. You alight, and you try it, and you leave. A knock on the door, telling you to run. But you try, for a day or a week or a month. Every place is strange, and you think maybe that is good. No one ordered you here. Not even the ghost.

You didn't let the water carry you, and this choice lives inside you, festering with the stink of fresh-turned fertilizer. Something lives there, you know, something pressing its way out of the dark, out of the maze, out of the silence. It's unfolding and curling and cringing towards the light, the noise, the pressing texture of the air that lives in the back of your throat. It hurts, and you hate it, but you remember the silence of the water. It was familiar, and safe in the way smooth, silent poison is. You have learned, lately, that you like it rough. Smooth, slick, shiny— these have done you no good. Everything good, you have had to fight for. You're not sure if it's about things worth fighting for or about finding worth in the fight, but you know the other side of the coin. Flick it up, flip it over, that silver glint in the air, and it lands to show you another choice. And that is what you do: you choose. Not this, not this, not that. You may not know what you want, but you know what you don't want. The choices you hesitate on, you keep closest. The silken adrenaline fluidity with which the Winter Soldier responded to everything— he doesn't freeze. He was frozen, but he never froze, and you are not him. You hesitate. You are you.

You try, because you choose to, and the failures teach you things the successes don't. You become obsessed with places where many people failed: abandoned buildings drenched with the sick scent of mold; dusty mansions strewn with crusted-over velvets like unnecessary corpses; creaking apartment buildings with photographs behind careful, broken glass. Sometimes the signs of life shoulder their way through the overlay of failed and forgotten things, and you think: this is how it happens. You learn what it takes to preserve the past, chemical trickery like what was done to you.

But they didn't want you. No one wanted you. Not even the ghost wants you.

You lean against the wall of a vacant flat, and breathe in the scent of still air newly disturbed.

 

___________________________

 

 

Steve lets Bucky in.

He wouldn't let Bucky help with the funeral. But Bucky tells him he's with him to the end of the line, and clasps him on the shoulder. And lets go.

And Steve looks at him, and takes a breath — Bucky remembers how that inhale felt against his own face, the one time, the only time — and lets him in the door.

Inside it's the familiar scent — dust, wood, paper — and Bucky takes his shoes off at the door because Steve stubbornly makes a home here, a place that is loved no matter the shabbiness. Sarah's ghost breathes down Bucky's neck, her absence from this place Steve kept for her, always more for her than for himself. The light through the clean glass and brown butcher's paper is somber and dim on the immaculately kept run-down flat with the few blotches of colour scattered where Steve could afford nice things to draw with, the sketches strewn around like they don't matter. Like they aren't beautiful. Bucky takes a breath — a smell nothing like the apple pie Bucky's had so little of, but hitting the same place in his gut — but Steve speaks before Bucky can say anything: "Her things—" he starts. Swallows.

Bucky's hand comes up, hesitates. "I know," he says, as if that's better. "I'll help."

The hard part is the cedar chest. Her good dresses are in there, folded up for the day she woke from mourning, the day she would be out of the TB ward, the day she would be out of her own hospital bed. The smell of camphor rises up as Steve unfolds the layers, marrying the sharper thread of cedar and its drabber woody cousins, redolent in Steve's apartment. Bucky watches Steve run the fabric between his fingers, its bright blue so incongruent against Steve's pale skin, against the browns and creams and dusty greys of where Steve insists on staying.

Bucky kneels beside him on the floor. Breathes. Waits.

"She loved to go dancing in this," Steve says. 

Bucky is quiet a moment. It feels strange, not being able to say the first thing on his mind around Steve. Fragile, breathbare, new. He doesn't like it, he thinks. Not like this.

Bucky says, "She was beautiful."

Steve looks up at him, and his eyes are blue, blue, blue. The kind of blue Steve would want to capture in a drawing, Bucky thinks.

Steve isn't crying. Bucky thinks maybe it would be easier if he was, because that is when one of Steve's hands comes up off the dress to touch Bucky's face, and Bucky's breath hitches in, just a little, lips parting. Steve thumb's lands there, bridging the gap between Bucky's lips, a gentle touch that tastes and smells of nothing.

Bucky can't breathe.

"I remember, you know," Steve says. His smile is wry. Bucky wants to touch that smile. He's never felt that smile. It always seemed so impossible.

Bucky holds absolutely still. It's so quiet here, just the two of them breathing.

"It's not—" Steve huffs a laugh, lashes sliding shut as he shakes his head and looks down. "I couldn't forget," he says, before looking Bucky in the eyes again, and Bucky sucks in a fraction of air at that, that blue stare. Steve breathes, too, before saying, "It was just never the right time."

Bucky waits. He tells himself to wait. But: "Is it the right time now?" he says, hoarse, like he's never used his voice before. It never mattered this much before.

Steve's eyes track his. Steve's hand is still on Bucky's face.

"No," Steve says, and leans in.

It takes Bucky a moment to realize that _now_ Steve is crying, because Bucky's caught up in how Steve's face is close against his, for long seconds, the smell of him fresh-washed for the funeral, cleansed of everything that Bucky knows he must smell like, he has no idea if he's imagined this or if it's been pressed into his senses over years: paper, charcoal, lye, sweat, summers, ice cream, lake water, snow, and red and red and white and blue.

Bucky opens his eyes to see that Steve's are still closed. The cedar and mothballs smell rises around them, long-held dreams exposed to air and Steve crushing Sarah's dress in his other hand. Bucky puts his hand there, where Steve's fingers are tense on the fabric, and Steve opens his eyes, opens his hand. Looks up at Bucky. His gaze is steady, and drawn out too long, like there's something to prove by refusing to look away. Steve's still the stupidest genius Bucky knows, and Bucky swallows a laugh at that. He puts his other hand against Steve's face, swipes a thumb across the sharp rise of his cheekbone, where the skin is still damp.

_Will there be a better time? Another time?_ he wants to ask.

"What can I do to help?" he says.

It makes Steve laugh, for some reason, and Bucky leans his forehead against Steve's, huffing a breath of his own. Steve takes Bucky's hand off his face, and Bucky lets him. But Steve's slim fingers squeeze his, for a moment, before Steve blows out an exhale — it breaks against Bucky's neck — and says, "What should we do with the dresses?"

 

___________________________

 

 

You count your attempts at choosing, trying, failing. It's an impossible sum. But one you keep adding to. Your life is all odd numbers, fives and threes and ones. One. The odd one. That's you. You are one. There's just one of you.

You think about cedar and camphor and naphthalene and formaldehyde and isopropyl alcohol. Chemicals made to keep things in stasis. You know chemicals, and you know stasis. You know being frozen in place. Being frozen.

The Winter Soldier doesn't like winter, you think.

You may not be him, but you aren't anyone else, either. You are you, and you are not frozen. You are smelling and tasting and touching the world that you woke to, hearing its clamour and seeing its bright lights.

The ghost wants you to be someone he knows. Someone you were, maybe, an infinite series of sketches and copies of selves ago.

But you are awake, and you are moving, and when the ghost comes, you will know what to say. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure I have particularly articulate thoughts on this aside from two things:
> 
> 1) I never tried a 5 Things fic before and made my first attempt entirely unnecessarily complicated, which is very on brand so here we are I guess
> 
> 2) It really is kind of uncool for Steve to keep insisting that post-CA:WS Bucky actually IS Bucky. Like, that's pretty oppressive, dude.
> 
> In lieu of actual notes, I offer a moodboard:
>     
>     
>     — The dead are cold / they'll welcome me
>     — You are in love with the impossible
> 
> [[here](https://books.google.com/books?id=nQg-BQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=antigonick&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjcuJD0z9TcAhUKDq0KHeUtCHMQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)]  
>    
>  | 
>     
>     
>     And no one saw and no one heard
>     They just followed the lead
>     The pictures in his mind awoke
>     And began to breed
> 
> [[here](http://justira.tumblr.com/post/176895321031/fyeahwintersoldierand-no-one-saw-and-no-one)]  
>    
>  | 
>     
>     
>     Do not ask
>     The price I paid
>     I must live
>     With my quiet rage
>     Tame the ghosts in my head
>     That run wild and wish me dead
> 
> [[here](http://justira.tumblr.com/post/176895303081/wintrrsoldierrtame-the-ghosts-in-my-head-that-run)]  
>    
>   
> ---|---|---  
>       
>     
>     I think I'm a better ghost
>     Than I am a human being
> 
> [[here](http://justira.tumblr.com/post/176895278111)]  
>    
>  | 
> 
> [some pictures worth a thousand words](http://justira.tumblr.com/post/176895254206)
> 
> | 
>     
>     
>     You were my everything
>     which, upon reflection
>     was probably the problem
> 
> [[here](http://justira.tumblr.com/post/176895242436/asofteravenger-a-cautionary-tale-but-at-least-it)]  
>    
>   
>       
>     
>     The last time Bucky got to choose
> 
> [[here](http://justira.tumblr.com/post/176895211901/septembriseur-therealdeepsix)]  
>    
>  | 
>     
>     
>     Dessa — Call Off Your Ghost
> 
> [[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6A8T6qWPBo)]  
>    
>  | 
>     
>     
>     Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December
>     And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
> 
> [[here](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven)]  
>    
>   
>       
>     
>     True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
> 
> [[here](https://quotecatalog.com/quote/francois-de-la-rochefoucauld-true-love-is-li-ga4JrA7/)]  
>    
>  | 
>     
>     
>     Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it,
>     I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines.
>     There must be ghosts all over the world.
>     They must be as countless as grains of the sand, it seems to me.
>     And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.
> 
> [[here](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/973008-i-am-half-inclined-to-think-we-are-all-ghosts-it)]  
>    
>  | 
>     
>     
>     My specter around me night and day
>     Like a wild beast guards my way.
>     My emanation far within
>     Weeps incessantly for my sin
> 
> [[here](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Spectre_around_me_night_%26_day)]  
>    
>   
>   
> And a post I came across right as I was preparing this fic for upload, which doesn't really go in the moodboard but I can't just let pass: ["the level of gay in Captain America: The Winter Soldier continues to astound me"](http://justira.tumblr.com/post/176895957451/keire-ke-iamnmbr3-ok-but-the-level-of-gay)


End file.
